Exploratory Learning: Effectively Integrating AI with Hypothes.is

By Julia Grav, instructor, School of Business, Camosun College and Emily Schudel, instructional designer, Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Camosun College

On January 22, 2025, as part of the BCcampus EdTech Sandbox series, we introduced participants to the social annotation tool Hypothes.is, gave a brief demonstration of how Hypothes.is works both openly online and embedded in a learning management system (LMS), and reviewed how GenAI can be used to generate and enhance social interaction prompts. Participants discussed how Hypothes.is helps engage students in exploratory reading, provides informal opportunities for sharing personal experiences, and highlights misinformation.

What is Hypothes.is?

Hypothes.is is a tool that enables collaboration through social annotation. Several layers of collaboration and engagement are possible from student-to-content, student-to-instructor, and student-to-student. Students and instructors can highlight and annotate/comment on pages on the Internet, PDF files from a variety of sources (LMS, OneDrive, Google Drive), and YouTube video transcripts. With the integration of Hypothes.is into an LMS, annotations can be viewed and commented on by instructors and other students registered in the course. Student-to-student conversations initiated through replies to annotations can occur without students having to sign up for accounts and activity can be connected to the gradebook in D2L. This allows students to take time to reflect on course readings, engage in peer feedback, and collaborate on refining their understanding of readings before being formally assessed by the instructor.

Annotations

Annotations are any action (often in written form) that:

Purposefully interacts with a piece of text, video, audio clip, or image.
Promotes deeper understanding, greater recollection, critical engagement, and community building.

Examples of Hypothes.is Activities

Provide open questions for students to answer through their annotations and ensure annotations are of high quality.
Utilize questions so students have to personalize their responses. For example, “Can you think of any real-world examples where data analysis has significantly impacted decision-making?”
For recollection, have students link between texts that they are reading on the same subject.
When using the public version of Hypothes.is, have students annotate websites and critically reflect on the layout and structure of those sites.
Encourage students to read the course syllabus by having them annotate it.
Ask students to annotate one reading three times, asking them to check the credibility of the author.
Have students annotate social media posts to look for misinformation, and/or critically evaluate a social media post.
Ask students to create a positionality poster and share it as part of an annotation. For example, create a poster based on the text Critical Hope by Kari Grain.

Strengths

Hypothes.is enables engagement, collaboration, critical thinking, and discussions through:

Active reading where students can easily work on the same document, highlighting relevant passages and commenting on them, and reply to fellow students so that the content being commented on is easily referenced.
Engagement between peers, which is especially good for online asynchronous courses as it provides the means for student-to-student collaboration and dialogue.
Direct feedback through replies to individual or group comments by the instructor.

When embedded in an LMS (Hypothes.is integrates with most LMSs)

Students don’t have to create personal accounts on Hypothes.is.
Hypothes.is integrates with the LMS classlist [AP1] automatically so you can easily create group activities and assign a reading to a specific grade item.
There is an automatic marking feature for large classes.
Hypothes.is will provide email digests for activity in your courses, as well as a dashboard where you can see all activity, and grade activities, in one place.

Cons

If using Hypothes.is outside of an LMS, students need to create their own accounts and instructors have to create groups as needed.
In the LMS, PDFs need to be scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) technology in order for Hypothes.is to read them.
Technical issues with the integration. For example, Hypothes.is was sometimes blocked on various web servers, not allowing students to annotate texts as expected. To avoid this problem, print web pages to PDF or use OCR to convert scanned texts into highlightable and accessible documents.

Leveraging AI with Hypothes.is

While AI is not integrated into Hypothes.is, you can use AI systems to:

Develop some open-ended questions that expand various topics within an article.
Generate ideas when looking for new assignment ideas, providing universal design for learning (UDL) opportunities, and coming up with Hypothes.is prompts.
Encourage students to expand their own questions and dig deeper when commenting on peer work.

Reflections on the Webinar

During the webinar, participants engaged in two rounds of small group discussion. First, they worked together to annotate the article The Magic of Open-Ended Questions in Social Annotation in Hypothes.is using the question, “For you, what is the most valuable aspect of social annotation to support teaching according to this article, and why?”, to guide their comments and replies. Participants commented that they would have liked more instruction to help them get started with the tool, but noted how effective they thought Hypothes.is could be in a hybrid or online course to encourage group work, as well as to enhance in-person courses including in a flipped class model.

Second, participants were asked to use their preferred AI tool to enhance the original question explored in the first round. Participants said that AI was very good at giving generic responses even when they entered specific topics. “AI can be a good starting point to give you ideas for additional prompts, but you need to use your knowledge as the content expert to go deeper.” In addition, one participant noted that, “…you could create an assignment where students create something in an AI tool, then put that artifact into Hypothes.is for the whole class to annotate it, fact check it, etc.”

At the end of the session, we posed three questions for participants to consider:

For you, what is the most valuable aspect of social annotation to support teaching according to this article, and why?
What challenges do you see in using a social annotation tool like Hypothes.is to support student learning?
What questions do you still have about social annotation that this article does not address?

While we ran out of time to discuss the questions, we welcome anyone to add their thoughts to our Google Doc.